destroyed ring lands and scuffed cylinder walls. cylinder walls are pretty normal looking for a 2.5 with some mileage on it. 2.5's are worse for wearing the sides on the bores, most likely because of the lower rod to stroke ratio of the 2.5 engine.

to save john some money we are gonna use one of our low mileage cores, so that he can use drop in pistons and save the expense of machine work. we double checked the bores to be sure they were well within spec.

got the pistons out and precision balanced them. then i moved to the rings.......
im always annoyed when i go to gap the rings on stock bore pistons, because the wiseco "drop in" pistons come with rings that are often oversized out of the box. some people really like it because they dont gap them at all, and just throw the motor together, but i find it annoying because i want to gap the rings to exact tolerances. they are never more than 1 thou oversized but i still get aggravated over it.

got the pistons installed, the wristpins are in, the plugs and separator plate are installed, the gasket surface was cleaned a third time and now its time for heads. we went with arp hardware on this build.... theres a lot of misinformation floating around on the web about sequence and torque for arp hardware. be careful who your listening to, not everyone with access to a computer knows what they're talking about.

we finished up in the clean room and moved the engine out to the shop area to bolt everything to the motor and get ready to drop it into the car. most everything went really straight forward, till we got to the uppipe/turbo/3" inlet tube. they were all aftermarket and didn't work well together at all. we eventually figured it out but it ate up a bunch of time. note the killer B oil pick up tube in the third photo. its a super nice, well made, piece. i love using those on the nicer engine builds. also note the poor exhaust coating in the 4th picture. more than half of it has completely flaked off. grimspeed coatings are crap. the stock heat shields are the way to go. note how far off the uppipe is in the 5th picture. we had to use a thick washer between the bracket and the uppipe flange. the flange was also made wrong. 2 of the studs were too close together and were bowing the MLS gasket when we dropped it in place. i'm not sure why, but no one other than subaru seems to be able to produce a decent uppipe. the one to have is a stock STI catless uppipe.

Were you able to get the turbo to fit without it hitting the back of the engine where the trans connects? The up pipe was moved to the right (via the flex section) maybe 1/2 inch because the turbo wouldn't fit any other way. That's why I slotted the bracket to allow the adjustment.

It was a tight fit there and with the TGV housing during the original install:

If anyone's wondering, the intake tube is APS; there aren't many choices in the Subaru aftermarket. It does fit but just barely (see first pic in this thread).

And of course I was pretty disappointed in how the coating looks after only a year and 1k miles of use. That really wasn't worth doing at all. I've had rattle can paint stand up much better on DSM exhaust manifolds.

There's a "bump" in the aluminum that prevents the P&L oil adapter from being rotated further clockwise. I've been told this isn't present on all 2.5 blocks. If it can be knocked down with a grinder it may make the turbo's oil & water connections a lot easier. That area is really crowded, although it'll be a bit easier with the engine out.

That's all the input I've got for now. I can't wait to see the next installment of my "Extreme Car Makeover"

Not sure on yours but we have had success on some of the other turbos by reclocking the housings just a tad to get them to stop touching the tranny mounting flange. As for the grimspeed coating, out ceramic coating guy said they are doing something wrong. As for the P&L oil fitting they do an odd fitting on the back of the head to get it to use off the shelf premade #3AN lines. When we make the kit we do custom #4 lines with a 90 degree from the banjo fitting to get good clearance on the back of the head ( hopefully there is a picture of Ryan's oil feed line floating around.)

after hours of road tuning we finally had the opportunity to strap this thing to the rollers and see what kind of improvements we could make. the initial run was a little disappointing at 265whp. this is still better than stock power levels, but we knew we could do a lot better than that. each consecutive pull gained us additional hp, better boost control, and more accurate fueling at wide open throttle. we got a late start on the dyno tuning and at the end of the day (2 hours later) we had gone from 265 to 305whp. i knew there was a little more to be had (even tuning conservatively) and decided to try again the following day which moved us to 325whp. i believe the car has a lot more in it, but the goal was to tune the car for daily driver status, with a good safety margin, on 93octane. we ended up at ~18.5psi (its more of a curve than a straight line) with no knock retard, and 7000rpm. should be a great street car!

Just to let everyone know -- I'm driving the car daily and loving every second of it!

Power delivery is perfect and drivability is as good or better than stock. It's perfectly happy to drive in traffic but if you go WOT it had better be aimed in a straight line! It's exactly what I was looking for -- a good commuter that can still "bring the funk" when it's time to hammer down.

Except for me backing into a concrete planter at the TT office, it all went perfectly

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